Liza Power

YOUR first foray into Melbourne's steampunk scene is likely to comprise a trip to a local fleamarket. In among the second-hand books, clothing, plant stalls and hotjam doughnut vans, you'll chance across a character selling curious artefacts. Relics of another time, place and way of seeing things: clocks, jewellery, tools, machinery. One strange object will have you immediately beguiled. You'll wonder where it came from, who made it and how. So you'll barter with the stall keeper, carry your treasure home, set it by the computer and begin hunting the internet for its provenance.

Eventually, you'll come to a forum called Brass Goggles, where a lively coterie of tinkers will reply to your questions and offer tips on how best to restore your newfound possession. They'll have quaint names such as Augustus Dayafter, Capability Jones and Zeppelin Captain, and they'll pepper their correspondence with a peculiar brand of shorthand: ByJ (by Jove), QS (quite so), WTD (what the Dickens?) or GSOC (good show old chap).

Other members will post images of their latest, wildest inventions: steam-powered rocket suits, time machines, hand-sewn costumes, pedal-powered laptops, musical contraptions. You'll be impressed by their displays of ingenuity, imagination and meticulous craftsmanship. And you'll wonder how this endearing parallel universe began. This is the seductive world of steampunk, which began as a literary genre in the 1980s and has since evolved into, depending on your levels of enthusiasm, a hobby or overarching sensibility.

In the US and Britain, steampunk is a burgeoning movement. Oxford's Museum of the History of Science held the world's first exhibition of steampunk art last year; type "steampunk'' into YouTube and you'll find footage from conventions across the US in which women laced into corsets and bustles toy with expanding wings and men in helmets with ray guns explain their otherworldly inventions in engaging detail. Steampunk has been gathering momentum in Melbourne too, evolving into a regular calendar of events that take in a biennial New Year's Eve party called Euchronia, first staged in 2008, fashion parades and, at last year's Fringe Festival, a variety show titled Clockwork Butterfly.

At last month's Steampump, held at Bourke Street's Donkey Wheel House, 300-odd devotees of the retro-futuristic movement dressed in extravagant Victorian era-inspired costumes and took part in a program that included steampunk hula hoop, a gentlemen's self-defence class ("a sterling presentation on the multipurpose walking stick and how to maintain one's composure in the presence of villains and base characters. A how-to guide for caning those who so richly deserve it''), magicians, conjurers, bare-knuckle boxing, an "exhilarating expose on the etiquette of taking snuff'' and games of Faro or Bucking the Tiger.

From Wednesday, Circus Oz delves into the movement for its new show, Steampowered, which promises to deliver its audience to "a time where romance meets technology and everything is handmade and steam-powered”. Members of Melbourne's steampunk community, several of whom have been involved in the show's development, will attend a July performance in full regalia. Among them will be Alexandra Chambers, the costume designer behind Steampump and Clockwork Butterfly.

Chambers and her husband moved to Melbourne from the Blue Mountains two years ago and have since watched the local steampunk movement gather momentum. The two collected gramophones and other Victorian-era relics for years before realising “there was an entire movement already devoted to what we like doing”. For Chambers, steampunk's origins are best explained simply: “Basically, in the Victorian period, writers would imagine what the future would be like, so [the movement] is based on a Victorian vision of the future — people thought we would all be flying airships and dirigibles to work by now — combined with what's actually happened. So you have all of today's technology: iPhones, laptops, but they're customised; laptops in brass cases with old metal typewriter keys and engravings and the like.”

Chambers opts for plain-speak: "It's a reaction against the clean, harsh, mass-produced uniformity of modern technology,'' she says. "The idea of steampunk is that the level of detail they cherished in the Victoria period stayed with us; that craft element, the beauty and individual nature of objects.”

Steampunk enthusiasts don't fit a neat profile; they vary widely in age, profession and level of devotion. Chambers says many steampunk followers simply love to dress up. “We live in an age where people go to the opera in jeans and a T-shirt,'' she says. "So it's about having an occasion to dress for and adopting the manners appropriate to that occasion, too. Doffing your hat to someone, saying 'you're looking very fine today'. A genuine politeness and sense of courtesy.”

For many, the idea of remembering the Victorian era as a time of romance, good manners and utopian visions is somewhat incongruous. It was, after all, a time of rigid, repressive class structures, rampant imperialism and brutal colonisation. But it was also a time of great optimism and technological advancement; the dawn of the Industrial Revolution brought with it such inventions as the photograph, the electric telegraph, cars, bicycles, postage stamps, light bulbs and electric trains. Daily life changed shape, too; standards of living improved, "leisure time'' became a privilege of the many rather than the few and medical advances were considerable.

The particular conditions of the era are of specific interest to Robert Brooks, who runs History up Close, a company that tours schools and invites students to dress in historical attire and learn dances, games, music and sports from different epochs. From mediaeval armour to World War I Australian Army uniforms, Brooks's passion lies in bringing history to life; the daily rhythms, foods, activities and language that shaped particular eras. He sees the same joy in children re-enacting history as he does in the steampunk community at celebrations such as Euchronia.

"People find an item and it speaks to them,'' he says. "They think: 'That's what an airship pirate would wear, or a big-game hunter, Egyptian explorer or adventure botanist.' It's like playing dress-ups in prep but with fully grown people who are sophisticated, intelligent and playful.”

Steampunk has real spirit of self-invention.

The movement celebrates eccentrics, Brooks says, who counts phrenology among his hobbies. "Predicting someone's behaviour by the shape of their head, I mean, it's hilarious,'' he says. "I read an antique book and then just started collecting people's head measurements in notebooks. It's the sheer joy of being a bogus scientist.”

He says people gravitate towards objects that dictate character traits; shy, quiet people put on a pair of brass goggles or find an elaborate walking stick and suddenly begin to "walk taller''.

The Victorian era's sense of optimism is, for Brooks, one of steampunk's greatest appeals.

"It's not a gothic, dystopic sensibility and you'd struggle to find someone who imagines a post-apocalyptic future,'' he says. "Steampunk is never dark and scary. In science fiction there's always this sense of a used, dirty universe, places you wouldn't want to go, whereas steampunk is a utopia of sorts. It's a place where people are happy and life is full of possibility.''

Cliff Overton, better known in the Melbourne steampunk community as Mad Uncle, wrote what he considers to be the first steampunk manifesto for the Melbourne Writers Festival in 2009. A former industrial designer turned firefighter, Overton is a keen follower of steampunk literature and his penmanship extends to a local steampunk blog; on a separate site he's traced the fitout of his soon-to-open Thornbury steampunk shop. His manifesto, set in 2024, unfurls in a world where "the internet has become self-aware, realised it was really no good and turned itself off''. The last message it left on people's screens was: This is for your own good. "What happens when you're so connected and dependent [on technology] and someone pulls the switch?'' Overton asks. "There's a social move towards a slower and more genteel lifestyle. People turn to the subcultures that are living it and steampunk rises as this model for the path forward.''

Overton's manifesto makes for compelling reading: "With the collapse of the 'traditional' method of web-based communication, society turned back to the newspaper, the magazine and the book as the source of all gossip, wit and wisdom. That brief period in our language history where the acronym and the abbreviation ruled as communication mediums has vanished, with the only records of what LOL meant (let alone ROTFLMAO) now on display in museums.

"Once again, we learnt how to speak through full words and full sentences and once again we learnt to value the richness of real language ... Each day I pray a silent 'thank-you' to the webgod for having the courage and foresight to self-extinguish, and for trusting in the then fledgling steampunk movement to help humankind get over the need for speed and rediscover a sense of style.''

Overton spends weekends scouring fleamarkets for materials; he arrives for our interview wearing a pair of repurposed brass and steel World War II headphones. He's fitted the circa 1941 frames with new speakers and wiring so that they plug into an iPhone, the screen of which takes the appearance of a rotary dial telephone — one of many apps Overton delights in. He sees steampunk enthusiasts as modern hunter-gatherers, whose passion lies in tracking down discarded relics and giving them a new life. His background in industrial design means he "knows [his] way around equipment and manufacturing processes and materials,'' which, teamed with a long association with amateur theatre — set design, construction, prop building — makes for an inspirational goldmine. Overton's overarching goal, between building fantastical contraptions for his shop, is to create artworks that "can sit in an arts setting and say something clever and challenging about a contemporary issue — man's inhumanity to man, for starters — but use steampunk as a vehicle for that''.

At Circus Oz's Port Melbourne headquarters, set designer Darryl Cordell and costume maker Laurel Frank are preparing for the coming steampunk-inspired production, Steampowered. While both are relative newcomers to the movement, they saw great possibilities for creativity and expression. "Circus is pretty left of centre in many ways,'' Cordell says. "It sits outside mainstream society and people who work in circus, the lives they lead and what attracts them to circus; they're natural fringe-dwellers.

"Steampunk is an amalgam of quite a few things but it has a real spirit of self-invention and construction, which are things circus people do all the time.''

It doesn't hurt that circus was a main form of entertainment in the 19th century, so the nostalgia and sentimentality of 19th-century life is also, in a way, a nostalgia for a time when circus took the place of cinema multiplexes, television and the internet.

Frank has had the unenviable task of translating an aesthetic based around materials such as leather belting, brass buckles, cogs, clocks and corsetry into costumes performers can turn extraordinary feats in. "Top hats and goggles are huge steampunk signatures but they're just about the hardest thing to wear when you're doing a somersault or someone is standing on your shoulders,'' Frank says.

Designing costumes has thus involved negotiating with performers about which elements of the aesthetic they can work with.

"The costumes have to be washed five times a week, so leather and handpressed flowers aren't an option,'' she says. Neither is silk, velvet or lace: fabrics not designed with sweat or acrobatics in mind.

Frank says the steampunk philosophy of embracing individuality fits perfectly with a circus dynamic, where individual performers are cherished not only for their unique skill sets but also for their colourful personalities. "I've never made one-for-all costumes because they always need to express that sense of difference,'' she says.

Part of the show's development involved putting performers in costume and inviting them to respond to the character the attire dictated. "Just putting on the clothes puts you into a certain frame of mind,'' says Cordell, who hasn't donned a steam-powered rocket backpack yet because he suspects he might be a bit old for such frivolity.

As for the July2 performance, which will see the Birrarung Marr big top filled with members of Melbourne's steampunk community, both Cordell and Frank say they'll be looking out for mad scientists, alchemists and airship captains in all their finery. "Let's just hope they don't upstage the performance,'' Cordell says with a laugh.